VALE, VIDAL

I shouldn’t really have been surprised to hear of the death of Gore Vidal, he was after all in his eighties; but he was one of those people you get used to thinking will be around forever. There are many, I’m certain, wishing he’d gone years ago.

Gore wasn’t a likeable fellow. In fact, he was something of a bitch; but he was funny, and he was brilliant (although probably not quite so brilliant as he himself was convinced he was). As a novelist and essayist he was prolific, but his true metier was as a raconteur. His tool was the word, but his art was provocation; the iconoclasm was merely a hobby. A shameless name-dropper – considering his patrician background, a tendency less irksome than it was in his friend Truman Capote – his memoir was barely three pages gone before he gave us the spectacle of his step-sister Jacquie Kennedy, upstairs at a wedding, one foot on the bathtub, showing the bride how to douche.

I first stumbled upon him as a teenager via the movies he scripted: The Left-Handed Gun, The Best Man, a tele-movie, Gore Vidal’s Billy the Kid; then there were those scripts he wrote or re-wrote without being credited, Advise and Consent and Ben Hur among them; and of course the appalling Caligula (he never, he often said, saw his movies – his blood pressure couldn’t stand the director’s vision. They were a means to a pay cheque).

After a decade in Hollywood - deliberately getting rich enough to never again have to do anything he’d find disagreeable – and following a failed tilt at a New York congressional seat in 1960, Vidal returned to his first mistress, the novel. Over the ensuing two decades his output was little short of staggering. He was still drawn to the small novel of ideas, knocking one out – seemingly in his down time – every year or so; some of these were truly thought provoking, standouts being Messiah and Kalki, with which he bookended the period, dual explorations of humanity’s sad tendency to follow charisma into the abyss; and of course the iconic (ironic?) Myra Breckenridge.

His reputation as a novelist rests, however, with the historical works. Beginning with Julian, a re-telling of the story of Rome’s last pagan emperor, he very cleverly, and with inimitable style, set about questioning not only history but the way it’s written and passed down. Although never quite achieving the heights of Graves’ Claudius novels, these books are accomplished, witty, and leave for dead the pulp that passes for “historical fiction” nowadays. In this genre he overcame the one serious shortcoming that hamstrung his other novels: his monumental ego. Never quite out of sight in his fiction, in the histories it became a veritable asset, since most of our first-hand accounts, from Cicero onwards, are left by tendentious egotists bemoaning the fact that posterity will have to pay them the notice due but unpaid by their contemporaries.

The histories also gave him scope to slash at his country’s sacred cows, as in Burr, where the narrator describes General Washington: “[he] was cold and grim [. . .] He spoke the way one imagined a statue would speak”. The same book gives us one of the first portraits of Jefferson as cold-eyed pragmatist cloaked in idealism, unable to keep his hands off the female slaves. His Lincoln, criticised at first, knocks the plaster off the saint and gives us a convincing portrait of a great man with a great man’s mixed motives.

As he got older we saw more of him as an essayist and talking head, poking at the America he said had always been “a sanctimonious society of hustlers”. Here he is on the last days of the 1992 presidential race: “Clinton’s greatest asset is a perfect lack of principle. With a bit of luck, he will be capable, out of simple starry-eyed opportunism, to postpone our collapse. After all, [FDR] was equally unprincipled”. He meant it as a compliment. And four years later: “The American takes it for granted that his moral fibre is never to be weakened by healthcare, education of the people at large or, indeed, anything at all except Social Security [. . .] Unfortunately for the American [. . .] the fund is for all practical purposes empty”. Congress “has, since 1992, been in the hands of zealous reactionaries in thrall to the foetus and the flag as well as at angry war with those who do not have money”.

Always dubious about the erosion of civil rights in the name of fighting terrorists (even back when they were American), he once compared the actions of Lincoln during the Civil War with those of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al: “A war against terror is like a war against dandruff; I mean, it’s a metaphor, it’s not about anything. Civil war is a little more serious”. He was convinced the US was an empire in decline, with all the historical perquisites – increasingly authoritarian executive government, a decaying polity, et cetera. Interviewed by Bob Carr a few years ago and asked where he saw the US in fifty years, he answered: “somewhere between Argentina and Brazil, with maybe a good soccer team”.

Vidal’s positions were often simplistic, bordering on paranoid, and always calculated to outrage. His arguments however were unfailingly intelligent, nuanced, and backed by his encyclopaedic reading. He might draw outlandish conclusions, or just ignore those facts that contradicted his thesis, but facts there always were. You might well disagree with him – I often did – but doing so required getting your own facts straight, and engaging in actual thought rather than relying on hackneyed opinions. He was an irreverent, prickly, prophetic soul of a type becoming sadly rare. In an age of noisy and ill informed punditry his style and erudition will be sadly missed.

We can only hope to see his like again.